As a operator user, you will be able to view the status of jobs and printing, but
not make any modifications.
While the phpPrintAdmin print servers do provide Windows printing services, this
feature is particularly useful to monitor jobs being printed/plotted from your
Unix workstation, or via Zeh, which use Unix printing services.

In a networked environment, there are a few points through which a job
passes.

1) First, you create the job on your workstation and send it to the print
server. This might be done with a "print" command in an application, with
the "lpr" command, or via Zeh.

2) The print server places the job in the appropriate printer queue,
which is essentially a holding place for jobs to wait as jobs ahead of them
finish. Additionally, there may be some filtering applied to the print job
to make it printable by a certain printer.

3) When the job in the queue is the "first in line", the job is spooled
through to the printer itself.

phpPrintAdmin monitors the status of jobs in queues, and also the printers
the queues are printing to.

Home Page for phpPrintAdmin
The initial page for phpPrintAdmin simply shows the status of the servers in the
phpPrintAdmin system. Additionally, it may show important messages about
printing should there be any.
From here, there are three options to choose from as a operator user, two being
under the menu topic of "Jobs/Queues", and one under the topic of "Printers".
What follows is an explanation of each feature.

Jobs/Queues- job status –
This allows users to view the current status of jobs that are printing. Please
note that this only covers servers in the phpPrintAdmin system – job status on
the servers IMSONPS1, IMSONPS2, etc. will not be displayed. Since these servers
are exclusively Windows print servers, though, information on jobs on these
servers can be obtained via your Windows workstation. Please contact the help
desk for information on how to check the status of Windows print jobs on these
servers.
When you click on "job status", the print servers in the phpPrintAdmin system
are queried about what printers they currently have jobs for, and a list is
displayed of all print queues that currently contain jobs. Additionally, the
printer the queue is intended to print to is queried about its status, which is
useful if you want to see if your job is actually printing/plotting. If a
plotter or printer is out of paper, off line, etc, a message will be displayed
announcing the fact.

Something like this might be displayed:

Job Control

Select a printer to control jobs on....

Server name: atlas
Nothing to display
Server name: hernprint

Select

queue_name

num_jobs

is_bounce

combo

printer_status

h0100-4500

1

h0100-4500@hernprint

idle

Server name: calprint
Nothing to display

You can select one of the queues/printers displayed to get a detailed view of
its status. Click on the radiobutton for the corresponding printer, and click "submit query".

Queue: printing status: disabled if disabled, jobs will be accepted
but not printed
Queue: spooling status: enabledif disabled, jobs will not be
accepted
Number of jobs: 1

Jobs: (listing of jobs in queue)

Select

job_rank

owner

orig_host

class

job_id

files

size

time

1

root

localhost

A

198

/etc/hosts

287

08:29:19

Select an action to perform on the job:

if moving a job, enter the target queue here:

job_rank: shows order of job in queue. Lowest number is next one to be printed,
and up from there. Other possible messages are "active" (if a job is currently
being printed), "stalled" (if a job is trying to be printed but cannot for some
reason), or "error" (if a job has encountered some error while trying to print).owner: the unix user ID that "owns" (hence, printed and has control) of the
print job. orig_host: The host that the job originated from (the client's workstation)job_id: an automatically generated ID code for the job – useful for deleting
jobs manually files: the names of the file(s)size: size of file(s) submittedtime: time job was submitted

Jobs/Queues - printer status –
This feature will allows the user to query any printer on the network about its
status. Possible status messages would be if a plotter is "ready to plot", or "out of paper", or if a printer was
"idle" (not doing anything, and ready to
accept jobs).

An example use of this would be to verify that a plotter was ready to accept a
large job ahead of time.

To use this feature, just type in the name of the printer in the text field,
and press submit. The default information to return is the printer's status.
Additionally, if for some reason you wish to verify the model of printer, check
the appropriate box.

This feature allows a user to query the phpPrintAdmin database about what
printers it is storing information about. Please note the distinction here: this
section is querying a database, not an actual printer. The
database is accurate, though - it forms the basis from which configuration files
for the print servers are generated.

The first screen asks the user to create
a list of printers to select from by giving some criteria on what printer(s) to
display. For example, if you wanted to view the entry for the printer n0212-5si,
you could enter a string like "212-5si", and the printer n0212-5si would be
displayed in a list, possibly with others matching the same criteria. The search
string can be applied to search for the name, ip address, or model of the printer.
Additionally, the list can be filtered by which server the print queue resides
on to further narrow results.

The large table below allows the user to choose what kinds of information they
want to view about the printer. If no boxes are checked, a default list of
information will be displayed.

Here's an example of this: I want to print to the printer n0212-5si, and use
2-sided printing if possible (I'm not sure if the printer supports 2-sided
printing). I would use the "view printers database", using "212-5si" as my search
criteria. I would check the following box: option_Duplexer. Here's the
results I would get:

View Printers

printerID

ifhp_model

ipaddr

name

local_server

option_Duplexer

58

hp5si.gs

161.160.119.68

n0212-5si

atlas

Yes

The option_Duplexer column reports a "Yes" for the printer named n0212-5si, so,
yes, the printer supports duplexing.